Don’s personal plunge

Don has just reached a negative disapproval rating faster than ANY other person holding the office of president in recent decades. According to Gallup, yesterday Don hit a 51% disapproval rating, something he achieved in ONLY EIGHT DAYS!! Well, he did say he'd be amazing—we just didn't realise he meant amazingly bad.

The chart above if from Statista, which specialises in data visualisation and is neither political nor partisan. It compares Don's terrible performance with other recent presidents, and tells the story even more starkly than the words alone.

When President Obama left office, he had a strong 59% approval rating, which was among the highest for recent US presidents. Only Clinton (66%) and Reagan (63%) had higher final ratings, while Eisenhower (59%) and Kennedy (58%) were similar.

However, and like all presidents, President Obama had low times, too, and because of those low rating periods, he left office with an overall average job approval rating of 47.9%, and only Truman, Ford, and Carter had lower rating averages.

Approval ratings are, like all polls, snapshots, and the averages over time present once sort of portrait of a presidency. For as long as Don remains titular president, he'll have ups and downs, and he’ll probably sometimes have majority approval, too. Still, at the moment, he must be wistful about those heady days when he first assumed the title of president and was faced with an even split—45% approved and 45% disapproved of Don on Inauguration Day. Sure, that was record high disapproval ratings at the time, and his approval rating on Inauguration Day was by far the worst since Gallup started polling, but that means he can only go up, right?

Of course! On January 28, Gallup had him at a whopping 51% approval! Will that turn out to be the high point of his tenure? Personally, I doubt it, particularly as his gang manipulates events in ways that, they believe, will drive popularity. Maybe they’ll be right. Or, maybe Don has already seen the maximum height of his popularity and it’s all downhill from here. Which it turns out to be will ultimately determine how soon we’re rid of him, and which party controls Congress in 2018.

So, we can all be forgiven a bit of schadenfreude at Don’s miserable—yuge! bigly bad!—performance in the polls. We all hope it translates into stopping him and his agenda. That, however, requires more than gloating.

It’s time to get busy.

Mitt’s secret promise?

Did Romney's advisers make secret promises to gain Log Cabin Republicans' endorsement? Not wasting any time, the religious radical right has already started demanding that Romney clearly and unequivocally deny that he'll support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is he should was elected. We could have a couple days merriment out of this.

On the one hand, Romney could again bow to the religious radicals, as he's done so many times already, and deny support for ENDA and restate his opposition. If he does that, the Log Cabin Repubs will have lost the one tenuous thing they hung their endorsement on—will they then retract their endorsement, or will they sit and take the public rejection of the ONE thing they thought they could get?

If Romney caves to the demands of the religious radicals (and especially if the Log Cabins then retract their endorsement), it would absolutely help Romney with the religious radicals. However, Romney clearly opposing ENDA would also reinforce his image as being part of, or a captive of, the radical right extremists, which would be a very bad idea only days from the elections: The independents Romney would need to convince in order to win are leery of the radical right and their politics of hatred and division.

But if Romney supports ENDA or refuses to state opposition (or even remains silent), the religious radicals—most of whom don’t like Mormons, anyway—will be apoplectic. It will also reinforce his image as a flip-flopper. At best, he might win some moderates to his side, but can he afford to lose the hard right? Is it even possible for him to make up for the lost religious radical votes?

I can’t see any good or winning options for Romney. I think he’ll clearly state opposition to ENDA to placate the radical right, as he always does, and the Log Cabins will say nothing (apart from expressing their “disappointment”). In addition to everything else I said, this will also give us further evidence of how Mitt cannot be trusted—by anyone.

Better make some popcorn!

Booing and froing

Republican US Representative Paul “I love Ayn Rand so much I could plotz” Ryan held town meetings in his Congressional District in southern Wisconsin. In the video above from Think Progress, we see he was actually booed when he tried to defend the rich and their tax cuts—booed by his own constituents!

The US budget deficit exists in large part because of tax cuts aimed at the wealthy (a similar situation is here in New Zealand). Ryan wants to cut taxes for the rich even more, and use that as an excuse for ending Medicare—among other programmes that benefit ordinary Americans.

The problem for Ryan and the Republicans is that between 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, and 2005, the top 1% received more than 80% of the increase in income. So, Ryan and the Republicans want to take the already extremely well-off and make them even MORE well-off by taking even more from the people who got little or nothing during those 25 years, making them worse off still.

It’s not just Ryan’s own constituents who see through the bullshit in Ryan’s agenda: The link above says a “Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 72 percent of Americans wanted Congress to raise taxes on wealthy Americans making more than $250,000 per year.” [emphasis added]

The Republicans are completely wrong in their agenda and their class warfare against mainstream Americans. The question is, will American voters be disgusted enough to vote out the Republicans/Teapublicans in 2012?

Act the fools

The Act Party continues to provide endless entertainment. About a week after I wrote about the circus when the party dumped its deputy leader, the clowns again entered the centre ring.

Yesterday, Act Leader Rodney Hide suggested that Heather Roy may not return from her 2-week break, after all. Reportedly, Hide and others were talking with the woman who would enter Parliament in the event that Roy resigned. They also allegedly spread the notion that party founder and political has-been Roger Douglas, who had been Roy’s sole-supporter in caucus, was done with her.

Then this morning, word broke that another Act member, Peter Tashkoff, number seven on the Act Party List in the 2008 election, planned to challenge Hide for the Epsom Electorate seat that Hide now holds. He was scathing in his criticism of Hide.

Finally, Heather Roy returned to Parliament today—a week early. She said nothing mattered but the “success” of the party, but she also had to take questions about an alleged affair she’d supposedly had with her ex-staffer, who had leaked her scathing 82-page criticism of Hide. The source of those rumours was allegedly the Act caucus.

As a centre-left voter, I freely admit to a lot laughing and a bit of schadenfreude as the Act Party circus continues. But the truth is, National Party supporters, most of whom cannot stand Act for different reasons, won’t be too unhappy, either. After all, National doesn’t need Act to govern, should a total meltdown happen.

A less partisan observer might wonder why they’re all acting like this, and I’d suggest that it parallels the friction with the right wing in the US.

The Act Party was formed as a liberal (in the 19th century sense of the word) party, mostly libertarian, especially on economic issues. For the last election, they took on social conservatives—Garrett and Boscawen; though Douglas can’t exactly be called a moderate on social issues, it’s never been his focus.

There is always tension between libertarians, who believe that social issues are none of the government’s business and who pursue conservative economic policies, and social conservatives who feel that in many cases such issues are more important than economic issues. That same split happened to the teabaggers in the US, and is now playing out again there over issues like same-sex marriage and the Islamic cultural centre in New York City. The problem is that a union between the two kinds of conservatives is inherently fraught and unstable when they disagree so fundamentally over their core issues.

But in the case of Act, it’s all the more bizarre: The only reason they’re in Parliament at all is that Hide won the Epsom electorate. As it is, he may not be able to hold the seat, so do they really want to risk their only ticket back into Parliament? Without winning an electorate, they can’t get back into Parliament, so Hide would seem to be their only chance.

Obviously, I’d like to see them fly apart at the seams because I think they’re pretty useless. The old Act Party, much as I disagreed with it, was at least useful in that it presented an alternative viewpoint that was wrong, but rational. The new Act is all over the map, from right to far-right. Rather than being a more or less sane rightwing, albeit libertarian, party, it’s decayed into one filled with wingnuts, many of whom are racist, sexist, homophobic—oh, and they’re climate change deniers, too.

I can’t see who—or what—Act represent anymore, apart from itself. Act once was a party of principle. For it to survive, it’ll have to return to those days, and jettison the loopy extremists they’ve taken on board.

Comic relief

I’ve been pretty blistering in some of my posts the past few days, so it’s time for a little laughter: Yet another “family values” Republican has fallen in a sex scandal.

Eight-term Republican US Representative Mark Souder, who described himself as an “ultra conservative” has resigned after an extramarital affair with a staff member. To use his own language, he committed adultery. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

There are those, of course, who would judge me harshly for my schadenfreude at the fall of people like Souder but, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less. These fallen hypocrites have been waging a holy war on ordinary Americans—GLBT Americans in particular. They’re trying to impose their extremist christianist ideology on everyone and create a theocracy in America. So when they fall from power committing the very “sins” they rail against, I can’t help but laugh at them.

Souder was, as they say, “a piece of work”. A rabidly anti-gay politician, he voted against every piece of pro-gay legislation and in favour of every anti-gay bill. He compared gay people to alcoholics, adding, “I believe [people] can have a propensity to be homosexual. But I believe that it's wrong and it's controllable. That is a fundamental, biblically based view that doesn't leave a lot of room or comfortability [sic] in a society where they don't want you to have absolutes.” He also declared that “there just isn't much room to compromise” on any GLBT rights issue.

In 2003, he got a 100% rating from a leading christianist theocratic organisation, and in 2006 he got 0% on church-state separation issues—meaning he voted against separation of church and state. He was—laughingly ironically—also a loud proponent of “abstinence” education—do as he says, not as he does, apparently. Talking Points Memo’s YouTube Channel has a video of Souder and his mistress talking about abstinence education.

I’m delighted Souder will be out of Congress. He did evil to advance his religion, and he deserves his disgrace. America will be better off without him polluting Congress. Maybe now he can reform himself and do some good in the world, or maybe put his religion into action feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, those sorts of things.

However, I have a lot of sympathy for his wife and children who will be shamed (and probably shunned) because of Souder’s sexcapades. I hope they have a support network to help them deal with what Souder has done to them.

So, just as I do with every other fallen “family values” hypocrite, I laugh at Souder. But the funniest thing is that even amidst my schadenfreude over his fall, I’m still showing him far more compassion and humanity than he ever showed to GLBT Americans. And that is merely another of his sins.

Tip o' the Hat to Joe.My.God., where I found a couple of the links above.

Fun times

Once again, a chance for my not-so-secret pleasure known as schadenfreude, this time at the expense of my good friends at the Republican Party.

Whip it good

The “chairman” of the Republican National Committee is in hot water over the money the party spent on questionable items, as listed in their filing with the Federal Election Commission. Part of it was having spent $12,691 on limousines and $17,514 on private aircraft in the month of February alone (no similar spending on private aircraft could be found in the expense report relating to the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Tim Kaine, going back three months).

But what has Republicans all in awhirl is the revelation that just under $2000 of party money was spent at a bondage-themed adult club where topless women simulate lesbian sex (the RNC chair was not there). This in the “family values” party.

If the folks with the “bad judgment” (as the people doing such things are inevitably called) have to pay back the money, maybe they could do as we do in New Zealand: Have a whip-round.

Okie haters hate so much they don’t know who to hate

The Oklahoma state senate, in a huff of hatred and self-righteous homophobia, decided that they would decree that the recently enacted Matthew Shepard Act, combating hate crimes, would not apply in Oklahoma. Well, not the entire law, silly, just the part protecting GLBT people.

So the haters, led by the Republicans, of course, passed a law: Their law enforcement professionals would be barred—forbidden—from cooperating with federal law enforcement officials, and any evidence relating to anti-GLBT hate crimes would be destroyed after a short time.

One slight, tiny little problem: The haters cited the wrong section of the Act. So, instead of refusing to cooperate in the prosecution of anti-GLBT hate crimes, they decreed that Oklahoma will refuse to cooperate in investigation and prosecution of hate crimes motivated by race and religion. GLBT people remain protected.

You just can’t make this stuff up—but it makes for a really, really good laugh at their expense.